Terms of Service for the Internet? How would that make any sense?

It is well known now that the United States government tracks all of the actions of everyone who uses the internet. When I heard the idea of making a Terms of Service to the internet, similar to what many other programs have, I almost laughed. First of all, most Terms of Service are accessed using an internet connection. And as we know that the government indiscriminately tracks all traffic, approval of the terms of service is redundant. That is just the first of many issues with an Internet Terms of Service.

Assuming that the government somehow restrained itself from tracking you and only tracked you once you approved, the government would end up wasting even more time and money on the tracking program than they already are. If there was any person the government would be interested in tracking, why would this person agree to such a thing? The only reason I can think of is to intentionally give the government faulty information. If the government tried to be clever and only tracked the people who didn't approve of it, in addition to lying (as usual), they would still have to handle most of the population who don’t want to be tracked for privacy reasons.

Even if there was a way to access the terms of service without connecting to the internet, to deny yourself an internet connection for the sake of privacy is suicide in this age. In order to survive in nearly any business you need to be able to keep up with your competitors, who would likely be using the internet. While they could send a message to someone living across the country using email, you would need to write the message out and send it using the postal service (which doesn't track you). You spend more money and time for an equivalent result. In addition, people would be unable to send things to you easily and therefore are less likely to waste their time with contacting you at all!

As this is an Internet Terms of Service, it does not apply to how the government is tracking phone usage. Even assuming you find a way to avoid using the internet at all, you still need to worry about the calls you make as well as your phone’s GPS. This data is available to the government and, as it is not a part of the internet, means the government will be tracking you whether you approve it or not.

All of this is ignoring what the content of the Terms of Service would need to include; in other words, the fundamentals of the internet tracking program. First of all, it has a very low chance to actually find terrorist activity. Because of the extremely small proportion of actual terrorism in the United States, when they do find something suspicious, over 99 percent of the time it’s a false alarm. It takes a twisted logic to think that wasting money, invading the privacy of every single resident of the United States, and wasting time and privacy on false alarms are all worthwhile sacrifices in order to catch a minuscule portion of the population.

As the internet is a major part of modern culture and illegal activity may actually occur, the government should be able to monitor the internet in some way. However, keeping track of everyone’s usage on the internet is akin to reading everyone’s mail (which doesn't happen) and physically watching everyone simultaneously go about their daily lives (which also doesn't happen). It is as if the government fails to understand or doesn't care that they are essentially abusing loopholes in the US Constitution. Keeping track of every single person on the internet essentially violates the right to not be searched without warrant. 

After doing some research, I found that according to the Expectation of privacy test used by the Supreme Court, a person has a right to privacy if they expect it to be private and society believes it to be reasonable expectation. This means that there is no reason for the government to expect that this is right. Doing this makes the government seem to be either atrociously malicious, or that most of them fail to grasp that the people of the United States feel that they have a right to keep most of their actions on the internet private. A Terms of Service for the internet wouldn't change anything.